a series of notes The Border, 1931
I was a radical, but not a revolutionary.
They spoke of a new world order, a pulse of insurrection. I was a disciplinarian: a healer amongst daydreamers. Where they found potential, I sensed failure. Where they set on blind action, I insisted on prior judgment. Their hope was violent; my hope was over.
Sleepless beside the frothing sea hours after the final meeting. From the window, waves pound on the shore with a fury that crumbles mountains into pebbles of sand. The greater city lies veiled beneath the fog, almost illuminated, its winding streets muted by an apocalyptic emptiness. Abandoned tenements like my own skeletal in overgrown lots. No longer the metronome of the train’s roar could be heard, the lullaby that lulled me to rest long before the war. Always taking, never bringing. I reach over to pull up the wire screen. For the remainder of the night, a smell of smoke and sea wanders into the room.
I think over the meeting, their protests of indignation, that I was lost and compromised. If I was right to believe that it was my last, if it was right to abandon the only organized attempt for salvation. The memory of the man on the walk home interrupts these thoughts: the image of him moving towards me with graceful command, indifferent to the raindrops beating against his coatless body. When our glances met his eyes revealed cold, hard pools of blue, completely clear. Heavy in thought or in thoughtlessness? In these times, impossible to tell.
The party members were right. I was lost far out at shore. A global onus of fatigue had colonized my spirit, destroyed every branch of willpower, the imaginative capacity for hope. Overdetermined generalizations from a cancerous malaise: I was aware of it all and yet powerless to pull myself out.. Piles of books surrounding my bed, haunting in their repose. Ruins of a revolutionary, a theorist of the people. If I went to meet them the words stewed limply in the marshes of the page, phoneme arrangements evacuated of all meaning: able to be reached but unable to reach me. In these sleepless nights, it took no effort to plunge through passages of useless introspection, as winding and empty as the streets below my room, until the sun rose and the day restored itself. I would bypass the uncompleted tasks that would press upon me, seeing no task at all, cauterizing all remaining ties to the world.
The state of failure is seeing ourselves as God sees us.
The rain still falling outside the window. A wordless threnody, a reverie of poetry and of death Throughout these sleepless nights I had gleaned its temperaments -- it whimpers when it can, weeps when it must, leaves puddles, lurid blue, oases from a perverted paradise
Only beyond the city could the rain cry out in joy An unnameable place, a smear on a map of uncharted land
In the paradise of the unnamable place, the ruins become habitable. My besieged city is liberated from its humiliated dreams, no longer any need for meetings, any need for hope. Rain trickles to a stop. The sea pacifies. A mother’s leathered hands soften, and the return of her child’s laughter expels the dead air.
As if all my mind’s contents had been excised from memory, the capacity itself to recall dreams, the brief access to their contours the moment I wake into consciousness, grasping desperately at its degenerating form I awake from this night with only a single one recalled: I had returned to where I walked earlier in the evening after having left the meeting for ostensibly the final time. But rather than enter my apartment and submit to the lure of timelessness, the dense fabric woven between myself and the womb of the room, I turn instead and run after the coatless man I cannot remember his face nor the words exchanged; only that we spoke in low, hollow voices, perhaps in keeping with the enigma of the rain or fearing a danger from it. Two figures without a past, present, or future When we reached the outskirts of the city a light began to emanate from a fog until there was no longer fog and only light. The next thing I saw was the white of my room’s ceiling, where this dream began to deliver itself to me again and again
There is no new beginning There is no dry land anywhere